Dissipation as a Resource: Synchronization, Coherence Recovery, and Chaos Control

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that dissipation, often seen as detrimental, can be harnessed to control and induce various dynamical behaviors in quantum systems, including synchronization, chaos, and coherence recovery, using a Bose-Josephson junction.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach where dissipation is used as a resource to engineer dynamical phases and control chaos in quantum many-body systems.

Findings

Dissipation enables synchronization and long-lived coherence in quantum systems.

A dissipative phase transition leads to self-trapped and chaotic regimes.

Dissipation can regulate chaos lifetime and recover quantum coherence.

Abstract

Dissipation is commonly regarded as an obstacle to quantum control, as it induces decoherence and irreversibility. Here we demonstrate that dissipation can instead be exploited as a resource to reshape the dynamics of interacting quantum systems. Using an experimentally realizable Bose-Josephson junction containing two bosonic species, we demonstrate that dissipation enables distinct dynamical behaviors: synchronized phase-locked oscillations, transient chaos with long-time coherence recovery, and steady-state chaos. The emergence of each behavior is determined by experimentally tunable parameters. At weak interactions, the two components synchronize despite dissipation, exhibiting long-lived coherent oscillations reminiscent of a boundary time crystal. Stronger interactions induce a dissipative phase transition into a self-trapped regime accompanied by chaotic dynamics. Remarkably, dissipation regulates the lifetime of chaos and enables the recovery of coherence at long times. By introducing a controlled tilt between the wells, transient chaos can be converted into persistent steady-state chaos. We further show that standard spectral diagnostics fail to distinguish between the two chaotic regimes, revealing that spectral statistics primarily reflect short-time instability. These results establish dissipation as a powerful tool for engineering dynamical phases, restoring quantum coherence, and controlling the duration of chaotic behavior and information scrambling.